The Problems With Age Verification

This week, we've got a cross-post episode of Mike's appearance on Kevin Williamson's How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog's evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today — and you can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode.

In a world awash with misinformation and disinformation, those who spread and benefit from the chaos have worked hard to brand fact-checking and counterspeech as a form of censorship — and it's a worryingly effective tactic. But there's one type of counterspeech that is very hard to evade: mockery and satire. One person who knows that very well is Ben Collins, CEO of Global Tetrahedron, which purchased The Onion last year. This week, Ben joins us on the podcast to talk about the incredible power of mockery in the social and political landscape.

Way, way back during the SOPA/PIPA fight, a very important part of the resistance against the bills was coming from infrastructure operators who explained how they were technically incoherent and dangerous. One prominent group was the Internet Infrastructure Coalition, co-founded by Christian Dawson. Today, with legislative amnesia setting in and new requirements for infrastructure-level site blocking rearing their heads, the Coalition has released a new report: DNS At Risk. This week, he joins us on the podcast to talk about the report and the ongoing dangers of attacks on the internet infrastructure.

We've got a cross-post episode for you this week, courtesy of the Tech Policy Podcast by TechFreedom, hosted by Corbin Barthold. Both TechFreedom and The Copia Institute submitted comments on the FTC's inquiry into social media censorship, Corbin invited Mike and TechFreedom's Santana Boulton for a discussion all about what's going on. You can listen to the whole conversation here on this week's episode. Copia Comment: https://www.techdirt.com/2025/05/22/we-shouldnt-have-to-explain-to-the-ftc-why-content-moderation-is-so-crucial-to-free-speech-but-we-did/ TechFreedom Comment (pdf): https://techfreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/TechFreedom-Comments-FTC-Political-Bias-Inquiry.pdf

In something of a followup to our last episode about Elon Musk's playbook, today we're digging deeper into the comparison between Washington and Silicon Valley and what it tells us about DOGE. Johns Hopkins International Affairs professor Henry Farrell has been looking specifically at the concept of "blitzscaling", and this week he joins us on the podcast to talk about how Elon Musk and DOGE are bringing blitzscaling to government. "Blizscaling for Tyrants" on Substack: https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/blitzscaling-for-tyrants

We've written a lot about how understanding the playbook Elon Musk used at Twitter is key to understanding his current playbook with DOGE. The people who literally wrote the book on said playbook are New York Times journalists Ryan Mac and Kate Conger (the latter of whom joined the podcast last year to discuss the book), and this week they both join us to dig deeper into the ways Musk is reusing his Twitter methods on the entire federal government.

Though the original promise of the internet has been twisted and distorted, today we're seeing more and more people working to restore decentralization and user power online. One such person who sees the problem better than most is Flipboard founder and former Twitter board member (among many other things) Mike McCue, whose new application Surf is a kind of browser for the open social web. Mike joins us on this week's episode to talk all about Surf and the future of the internet.

We probably don't need to tell you that the current tariff situation is causing complete chaos in global supply chains, in large part due to the uncertainty — for all we know, the exact rules will have changed since this episode was recorded just yesterday. But we wanted to get some insight into the impact on small businesses, so this week we're joined by Jesse Vincent, co-founder of Keyboardio (makers of one of Mike's favorite keyboards, who recently wrote an open letter to their US customers), to talk about the challenge of running a business amidst Trump's tariff chaos. The open letter: https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/an-open-letter-to-u-s-customers

It's hard to create a law about children online without first identifying who the children are. We've written a lot about the problems that arise with mandated age verification, and a new paper by Eric Goldman, The "Segregate-and-Suppress" Approach to Regulating Child Safety Online, digs into why the entire popular approach to such laws is paradoxical and broken. This week, Eric joins us on the podcast for a discussion about why regulators should develop a wider and more thoughtful toolkit of online child safety measures. Read the paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5208739

Many people don't think of reproductive health and reproductive rights as tech issues, but they very much are — moreso than ever in a post-Dobbs America. The internet is vital to communication and spreading information around reproductive health care, while abortion drugs are changing the very nature of what reproductive rights protect. This week we're joined by Elisa Wells and Amy Merrill, two of the cofounders of Plan C, a nonprofit that aims to make abortion pills available by mail across the US, for a discussion about looking at reproductive health through the lens of disruptive technology.